StarOffice 7 debuts in India

BANGALORE: Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of the latest
version of its office productivity suite StarOffice 7 in India, as it firmly
sets its sights on denting the one vendor show in the desktop computing market.
The launch was kicked off at an event hosted by Sun for its customers.

StarOffice 7 Office Suite is a complete, feature-rich and affordable office
productivity suite, comparable to Microsoft Office. StarOffice 7 software offers
functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format. It
also introduces the new StarOffice Configuration Manager, the StarOffice
Software Development Kit, a macro recorder, and support for assisting
technologies, as well as for complex text layouts, claims a company press
release.

The latest StarOffice software is multi-platform, available on the Solaris
Operating Environment, Linux, and Microsoft Windows platforms, and supports 10
languages. Most importantly, for millions of potential customers in the country
the follow-on to last year's impressive StarOffice 6.0 starts at less than
one-sixth the cost of Microsoft Office 2003.

Commenting on the launch of StarOffice 7 in India, K Sugumaran, Regional
Director- Asia South, Volume Products, Sun Microsystems said, " With the
launch of StarOffice 7 today, we are truly poised to make a huge dent in the
office productivity suite market. We have incorporated several new features into
this suite to further make it attractive to customers worldwide and we are
already seeing a big movement away from proprietary office productivity suites.
India represents a huge opportunity for StarOffice 7 and we fully plan to
leverage the great price-performance ratio of StarOffice 7 to penetrate this
market in a big way".

Apart from its lower price, one of the greatest advantages of StarOffice over
Microsoft Office is its cross-platform support. Where Office 2003 will run only
on Windows 2000 and XP, StarOffice supports Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP, as
well as Linux and Solaris. "The latest office productivity suite is further
testimony to our commitment to open standards and supporting multi-vendor and
multi platform environments" added Mr. Sugumaran.

StarOffice software is set to meet the day-to-day office productivity needs
for a variety of users, from Governments and Global 2000 corporations to
medium-sized business to small businesses, home offices, home users and
students. StarOffice software and OpenOffice.org together are the leading office
productivity suites in the world on Linux and the Solaris OS.

"In a scenario where enterprises are looking to bring down costs and
increase productivity, we expect StarOffice 7 to emerge as a viable option. Over
the last few months we have seen our previous version of StarOffice 6.0 make
substantial inroads into the Indian market across segments like corporations,
home users and government," said K P Unnikrishnan, Country Head, Marketing,
Sun Microsystems India. "By using StarOffice 7, enterprises can cut down on
licenses to two-third of their present costs. India, one of the most price
sensitive markets in the Asian region is expected to be one of the largest
potential markets for StarOffice 7 and we are confident of capturing a large
share of office productivity market going forward" added Unnikrishnan.

Sun Microsystems India’s aggressive thrust on its StarOffice 6.0 over the
past few months has yielded major success with many large organizations
deploying StarOffice in their offices with some of them even replacing other
Office suites. The roster of StarOffice users, of versions 6.0 and 5.2, in India
includes leading banks like HDFC Bank, BPOs like ICICI One Source, new economy
companies like Apnaloan, corporations like JK Corp, government organizations
like Karnataka PWD, Department of IT-Karnataka, select government schools and
colleges and also defense organizations to name a few. The government sector,
the biggest spender on IT in India, is also looking at StarOffice seriously and
StarOffice 7 is expected to make further inroad into this sector.